It took a little bit of humbling for Gilbert Smith to get on board with honing his grappling chops, but he’s probably glad it worked out that way.

Smith (5-1 MMA, 0-0 UFC) fights Tuesday night against Luke Barnatt in the second episode of Season 17 of “The Ultimate Fighter,” which airs at 9 p.m. ET on FX. To get into the house, Smith submitted Eric Wahlin, continuing a trend that has spanned four years now. Four of his five amateur winds came by tapout, as have four of his five official bouts as a pro.

But his path to success in the jiu-jitsu world was not necessarily a traditional one.

Smith started out boxing in high school – but said he never had the discipline to keep up with it. And when he wasn’t getting into street skirmishes, as he said kids are wont to do in New York and New Jersey when coming up, he was wrestling with his friends. And there, he learned how to sink in chokes, and he took that with him into the Army.

“We used to have wrestling contests, and I would always catch people in these guillotines,” Smith told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). “Even in the Army, I just caught people all the time – I had no idea what a guillotine was, at least not technically. I remember going against one chubby guy, a sergeant. And I thought I was going to choke him out, too. But then he did this thing to my arm, this armbar, and he made me tap – and my arm was hurting for a long time.”

Call that Lesson No. 1. Lesson No. 2 came after he made a trip to New York to get some help from Marcelo Garcia, one of the most elite grapplers in the world.

“I was always a physical dude, always working out,” he said. “The problem is that I had a thought: ‘I could have all these muscles, but someone who’s 120 pounds could easily tap me out. What is the point of being big and strong if you don’t have the skills to use it?’ I went to Marcelo’s grappling school and he put me with a female to train with. I was thinking, ‘I’m going to hurt this girl.’ But she smoked me – she tapped me out so many times it wasn’t even funny. So it was, ‘OK, I need to learn this.’ I could bench 400 pounds, and I’m pretty sure she could barely lift the bar and she’s making me scream ‘uncle.'”

Now with his youth boxing and wrestling background combined with a jiu-jitsu skill set that is far more finely tuned than it was when he first started, Smith has his sights set on winning the “TUF 17″ crown – and what that would do for him.

Shuttled back and forth between his separated mother and father growing up, Smith said he didn’t have a privileged background. And now he wants to make up for lost time.

“I felt like I wasn’t given much opportunity to be great,” he said. “I see kids these days, and they have so much and they throw it away. I wish I had what they have. I wasn’t taught discipline, to push yourself, to drive. I didn’t have that, and I wish I did. I feel like I did a lot of things growing up that put me in a position where I didn’t live up to my full potential.

“So this is giving me the opportunity to be great. At the end of the day, all I want is to find a moment that before I die, I can look back and say, ‘I did that.'”

MMAjunkie.com interviewed all 14 of “The Ultimate Fighter 17″ preliminary-round winners, each of whom was featured in the debut episode of “TUF 17: Team Jones vs. Team Sonnen.” New interviews will be released each day until the season’s second episode airs on Tuesday.